NPR Punishes Veteran Editor Who Called Network’s Liberal Bias in News Coverage ‘Off the Rails’

National Public Radio has suspended a senior business editor, Uri Berliner, who blew the whistle on extreme leftist bias at the network in an essay last week in the Free Press, in which he said his employer had “lost America’s trust.”NPR’s David Folkenfilk reports that the five-day suspension without pay, which began Friday, was punishment for violating NPR’s policy to secure approval for outside work in other news outlets. Mr. Berliner, who has worked for NPR for 25 years, published an exposé in the Free Press last week detailing the network’s radicalism and “absence of viewpoint diversity.”In the days since his essay was published, the network has been embroiled in turmoil over bias concerns, including resurfaced tweets from NPR’s chief executive, Katherine Maher, who took the position in January. A conservative activist, Christopher Rufo, reposted a series of old tweets on Monday from Ms. Maher calling Mr. Trump a “deranged racist sociopath” and describing dreams about “sampling and comparing nuts and baklava” with Vice President Harris. The tweets include Ms. Maher calling for race-based reparations to pay for “our original collective sin and unpaid debt,” calling herself “someone with cis white mobility privilege,” and saying America is “addicted to white supremacy.”NPR defended Ms. Maher, noting that she was not in journalism at the time she wrote the tweets and that she was “exercising her First Amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen.”Criticism of NPR has also included calls from President Trump to defund it. “NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM! EDITOR SAID THEY HAVE NO REPUBLICANS, AND IS ONLY USED TO ‘DAMAGE TRUMP.’ THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!,” Mr. Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last week following publication of Mr. Berliner’s essay. Mr. Berliner’s bombshell essay called out the network’s coverage that has at times gone “off the rails,” and expressed concerns about NPR’s handling of stories involving Mr. Trump, the origins of Covid, and the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. He said that internally, “race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace” and that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.” When it comes to covering the Israel-Hamas war, he wrote, NPR downplays antisemitism, focuses on “Israel doing something bad,” and looks at the war through an oppressor versus oppressed mindset. “That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world,” Mr. Berliner wrote.NPR’s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, rejected Mr. Berliner’s claims. “We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” she wrote in a memo to staff. “We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world.”

NPR Punishes Veteran Editor Who Called Network’s Liberal Bias in News Coverage ‘Off the Rails’

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